Obama should press Chinese for release of jailed journalists
Dear President Obama: We are heartened by news reports that you plan to talk to Chinese leaders about human rights and related issues when you visit the country next week. On World Press Freedom Day in May, you specifically raised the cases of two of China’s jailed journalists—Shi Tao, imprisoned for allegedly “leaking state secrets,” and Hu Jia, behind bars for alleged “incitement to subvert state power.” Both men remain jailed, and we ask that you now press for their immediate release.
Playing the spy card against WSJ in Pakistan
Last Thursday, Pakistan’s The Nation newspaper published a reckless and unsubstantiated story accusing Wall Street Journal South Asia correspondent Matthew Rosenberg of being a spy. It’s an accusation that gravely endangers Rosenberg’s safety. Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Robert Thomson responded with a scathing letter to The Nation’s editor, Shireen Mazari, expressing his disgust at the publication…
Toronto’s Citizen Lab uses forensics to fight online censors
A basement in the gray, Gothic heart of the University of Toronto is home to the CSI of cyberspace. “We are doing free expression forensics,” says Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, based at the Munk Centre for International Studies. Deibert and his team of academics and students investigate in real time governments and…
CNN’S Lou Dobbs threatened; shot fired at home
On October 26, 2009, CNN anchor Lou Dobbs announced on the air that a shot had been fired at his home while his wife and her driver were standing outside in the driveway. Dobbs made the announcement on CNN and his syndicated radio program, saying the gunshot struck his home about three weeks earlier as…
Brad Will killing unresolved three years on
Three years ago today, an independent journalist named Bradley Roland Will was killed in Mexico while reporting on a heated protest movement in the capital city of the southern state of Oaxaca. Today, the crime remains unresolved. A man from Oaxaca, Juan Manuel Martínez Moreno, who many close followers of the case believe is innocent,…
An Iraqi journalist in America: Gathering my family
Nearly six months after my arrival in the U.S., most of my family has finally joined me in Arizona. Making the trip from Baghdad was my father, who turned 63 in October; my mother, who is 50; and my 16-year-old brother, Anas, who is very eager to discover this big country.
It’s an honor
Yesterday, CPJ received the Thomas J. Dodd Prize for International Justice and Human Rights at an outdoor ceremony at the University of Connecticut. It was one of those perfect, crisp fall mornings in New England with a strong wind blowing clouds across the sun and shaking the first leaves from the maples, which have already…
CPJ receives Dodd human rights prize
New York, October 5, 2009—The Committee to Protect Journalists was honored today with the fourth biennial Thomas J. Dodd Prize in International Justice and Human Rights. The $75,000 prize is given “to an individual or group who has made a significant effort to advance the cause of international justice and global human rights.” CPJ was…
U.S. reporter faces ‘insult’ suit in Brazil air crash aftermath
New York, September 29, 2009—U.S. freelance journalist Joe Sharkey, who covered a 2006 plane crash in Brazil in which he was a passenger, faces an onerous civil defamation suit for comments he said were wrongly attributed to him. On the third anniversary of the accident, the Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Brazilian judicial authorities…